


Pitch Black, Flesh and Bone

by Neyasochi



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Comes Back Wrong, M/M, Psychological Horror, Reaper/Jack, Space Horror AU, Suspense, established jack/gabe, it's the Omnic Crisis but as a multigenerational war spread across the galaxy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-09 04:02:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16442606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neyasochi/pseuds/Neyasochi
Summary: When a chilling distress signal brings theGibraltarand its crew to the ruined husk of theSvyatogor, Katya Volskaya’s behemoth flagship, Jack Morrison knows in his heart that Gabriel Reyes sent it. He trawls the depths of the ghostship hunting for the man he loves most, dread slowly drowning him in his own spacesuit—And then Jack finds him, the lone survivor of a crew numbering nearly three-thousand souls.Gabriel.





	Pitch Black, Flesh and Bone

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Flora Cash’s You’re Somebody Else, with the added benefit of reminding me of a movie I loved as a kid. :)

“It’s dead, Captain.”

“It can’t be.”

But it’s hard to argue with the readings that blink lazily across the control panel in front of Winston. Harder still to refute the sight of the _Svyatogor_ dead ahead of them, thrusters down, spinning through space in slow, languid somersaults.

“That’s what Athena’s sensing,” Winston says in a low, considerate tone. His mouth draws tight as he looks to Jack for a response. “Captain?”

On approach, they pick up the glimmer of refuse. Starlight is thin in this quadrant, the space around them unusually empty and dark, but it’s just enough to catch on the bits and pieces of Katya Volskaya’s armored flagship that drift around the remains of the massive vessel.

“Have her scan it again. There’s no way everyone on that ship— I mean, there must be survivors inside _somewhere_. The bridge is intact, and there are two dozen different failsafes and emergency seals between the portside crew quarters and the breach,” Jack says as he enlarges the holo map of the _Svyatogor_. His fingers shake, but less than he worried they would. Maybe little enough to go unnoticed. “Someone onboard sent that distress signal, and they deliberately hailed _us_.”

 _Me._ He doesn’t add that thought, trying hard to keep his personal stake out of this. There are lives at stake— hundreds of them, all valuable, but none more important to humanity’s continued survival than Katya Volskaya. But the hope hinging on his words is plain; his crew knows, no matter how Jack tries to blanket the waver in his voice. 

The mayday message had been sent deliberately to the _Gibraltar_ . It had mentioned him by first name, without title, and there’s only one person stationed aboard the _Svyatogor_ who’d call on him like that. 

The holo in front of them glows a ghostly blue, streaks of bright hard-light forming a 3D image of the _Svyatogor_ that he can manipulate by hand. Athena’s drawn it from classified records of the warship’s blueprints, complete with notations of all its pathways, ducts, airlocks, failsafe seals.

At a touch, Athena modifies the map of the _Svyatogor_ to reflect the current battered state of the ship as seen from their bridge. The damage is noted in orange, glowing warm and ominous in the dim of the control room. It’s more extensive than he’d feared.

The hangar bay and half of the crew quarters are… gone. Entirely. The ship is gutted, but even so—

“Catastrophic failure of some kind,” Satya says as she steps forward.

Jack blinks, re-centers his thoughts, and gives the technical officer a curious look. “Not an omnic assault?”

“I see nothing to indicate such.” Her slender hands reach past Jack’s and turn the projection of the _Svyatogor_ for a better look, all elegant movement as she pinpoints every facet of its destruction. “An implosion, with multiple points of failure here, here, and here. Most of the ship _is_ compromised, but the bridge and many of the communal spaces are indeed intact.” 

But no signs of life, according to Athena. It doesn’t quite make sense.

“There should be… some sign of them,” he says, and the words sound distant. An entire crew— especially of the _Svyatogor_ ’s size— being spaced is unheard of. And by an accidental malfunction? There’s no sense to it. There’s no reason all two-thousand-eight-hundred-sixty-seven people on the manifest should have been lost down to a man.

And Katya Volskaya, empress of the war effort and powerhouse of warship construction, among them. Her young daughter, too.

And—

“Still nothing,” Winston says heavily, adjusting his glasses as he scans Athena’s latest readings on the _Svyatogor._ “No automated distress signals, no communication from the ship’s AI, no register of any omnic presence or escape pods in the area. No signs of life at all.”

Jack can feel eyes on him. A roomful of them, waiting. 

“Message Petras and tell him we’ve found the _Svyatogor_ , but no immediate sign of Katya Volskaya or her daughter. Torbjorn,” he says, “we’re going to need to board that ship and figure out what happened.”

“Aye, Captain. I’ll get her steady, don’t you worry,” the squat engineer says as he and Athena calculate anchoring shots to stabilize the _Svyatogor_ and draw her in.

Jack takes one last look at the blown out husk of Katya Volskaya’s flagship adrift in the stars before deliberately turning away. “Vaswani, could you go wake Reinhardt, Dr. Zhou, and Dr. Zeigler? We’re going to need a small team prep, too.”

“Of course. Captain, I—” She takes a breath, composure holding fast even in her struggle for the right words. “You have my condolences.” 

He can only nod her off. The clicking of her low heels across the floor has long faded before Jack can stir himself to continue on. He has a heavy task before him, a duty that demands attention, and it’s almost a welcome distraction from the grief already pouring in to fill the ever-deepening pit in his stomach.

He pauses beside Torbjorn, a hand resting on the back of the engineer’s chair.

“Torbjorn,” Jack murmurs. “What do you think are the chances…”

“Been around long enough to know you can’t always trust what the machines tell ya, Captain,” Torbjorn replies. There’s a stiff but well-meant smile underneath all that facial hair. “We’ll get in there and see. It damn well don’t make sense for the whole ship to be abandoned,” he mutters, once again consulting the _Svyatogor’_ s blueprints. 

It doesn’t. 

“Right,” Jack agrees, though his heart is already sinking lower. “We’ll see.”

They suit up in silence, and Jack gets the distinct impression everyone is tiptoeing around him. The docking goes smoothly, but though the gap between the _Gibraltar_ and the _Svyatogor_ is narrow— in the scope of space, at least— it remains a harrowing crossing.

The tethers mooring them to the _Gibraltar_ are strong, but not unbreakable. Jack has seen them snapped and frayed and watched soldiers flung out into the abyss, their own momentum and panicked flailing carrying them farther than the jetpack fixed to the back of every spacesuit can make up for.

They cross slowly, one at a time so that Winston and Dr. Zeigler can keep careful watch. Reinhardt goes first, his energy shield bared as a precaution against lurking omnics; Jack follows, with Torbjorn in tow. He keeps his pulse rifle raised and trained ahead, wary of some lurking omnic threat no matter how many times Athena tries to reassure him with the results of her scans.

There is a gaping hole in the _Svyatogor_ where half of the crew’s berthing quarters used to be, the ships metal belly blown open. Jagged and bent, the fissure stretches all the way to what was once a massive hangar meant to house the latest models of sleek dogfighter jets. Bodies float frozen in the void space around them, rigid and broken from collision with debris.

He sees a thin trace of blue light ripple over the nearest corpses— Athena scanning, counting, tallying the dead for them. It’s the work of minutes for her, each sweep picking up new bodies, the toll rising to a number that has Jack feeling heavy despite the zero gravity.

“It’s like the whole damn crew was in one place when it happened,” he comments as he maneuvers through the wreckage, pulling himself along on the anchoring rope and jagged pieces of what were once walls and rails, ever cautious of floating shrapnel. The thought sticks under Jack’s skin like a splinter— why, though?

Reinhardt’s bulk helps clear the way ahead, bearing the brunt of the slow collisions of drifting refuse and bodies from the ship. Nothing is traveling fast enough to kill— especially with their armored suits on, made specifically with omnic combat in mind— but in space it only takes one good shove to send someone careening, disaster only ever a hair’s breadth away.

Gradually, the bent and broken bones of the _Svyatogor_ give way to recognizable rooms and halls. It’s all scorched to hell and riddled with holes from shrapnel, but more like what a ship should be. More like what it once was.

“This entire section of the ship’s blown out,” Winston says through their comms. “There should be an emergency seal close ahead. Power is likely dead, though.”

They advance down pitch black hallways, drifting, pushing off of the walls and floors to keep their momentum. The wan blue glow of Reinhardt’s shield helps illuminate their path, if only a little. The only other light comes from the focused beams of the flashlights mounted on their weapons and the ambient light from various components of their spacesuits, like the severely oversized thruster on Reinhardt’s back.

The normally-faint glow of Jack’s pulse munition cartridges seems sharper and brighter here. The shadows seem darker, too.

“Found the seal,” Jack informs the team back on the _Gibraltar_ as they encounter an airtight lock in the middle of the hallway. A slow scan with the light on his rifle reveals a floor code in several languages.

“Sector K-17?” Winston asks for confirmation. “That’s the ticket. Can you get it open, Torbjorn?”

“Aye. One way or another, we shall pass,” the engineer mutters as he fixes a grenade-sized device to the panel beside the emergency seal. It detonates with a contained little flash, utterly silent in the muffled void of space, and then Reinhardt is able to pry the seal doors open wide enough for them to slip through.

The next seal is already halfway open, as if the power had cut before it could close. Jack turns to eye his team as he slips through first, and the underlit glow of their helmets reveals expressions bearing his same misgivings.

“Where’s the AI?” Jack asks as they continue, running a hand along a lightless panel along the wall. Athena’s operating light runs a deep, electric blue all through the _Gibraltar_ , like a thread that holds the entire ship together; he isn’t sure what color the _Svyatogor_ ’s AI runs.

“Hibernating, maybe,” Torbjorn suggests, but there is a falseness to his tone that doesn’t sit well with Jack. Doubt. “Not even limited reserve power left. Maybe the AI core sustained damage during all of this.”

“But the bridge is intact… all the AI mainframe levels are, too.” By all accounts, it should still be operable. Or at the very least unharmed. It now seems a question of whether the ship AI went offline due to the catastrophic failure, or whether it going offline _caused_ it. Jack’s never heard of the latter happening.

With Winston’s guidance over the comms, they eventually reach the bridge. It’s dark. The beam of Jack’s mounted light catches on particles hanging in the air, floating pens and coffee mugs, shards of glass. No bodies, though— it’s as if it had been abandoned even before everything went to hell. 

Reinhardt’s voice feeds in through his comm. “It would seem the AI is called Baba Yaga,” he observes as he reads the lettering under one of the AI screens. 

“And she’s been disabled,” Torbjorn chimes in.

“Disabled?” Winston asks before Jack can.

“Completely,” Torbjorn says. There’s a short grunt on his end. “She’s not responding… I don’t see any external damage, but who knows what’s going on underneath.”

“Someone sent that mayday manually before Baba Yaga went fully offline. It had to be after the failure occurred and… and the rest of the crew got spaced. So someone lived,” Jack posits, just shy of stumbling over the words.

“We don’t know the sequence of events yet, Captain,” Torbjorn cautions, weary in his words. “Best not to get ahead of ourselves.”

Jack can feels the older man’s eyes on him, the concerned weight in the silence streaming over the commlink.

“I want you two to focus on securing the black box,” he decides after taking a deep breath. “Torbjorn, get the AI up and find out what you can. See if you can restore any functionality. I’m going to do a quick search of the areas that haven’t been blown to hell.”

“Athena’s readings still show just the three of you onboard,” Winston supplies, trying to be helpful. 

Jack says nothing at first. Then, “Just being thorough.”

He can feel his older comrades’ disapproval as he retreats from the bridge, the sound of his own breaths swimming around his ears, the confines of his helmet holding every sound too close.

He doesn’t make it far down the hall before Torbjorn speaks up.

“Getting the reserve power online. Hold on to your britches,” he warns before giving the others a brief countdown.

Jack grabs a length of railing and braces himself just before the ship hums back to some semblance of life.

It comes in the form of a yawning noise deeper within the ship— the sound of a behemoth waking, aching from its many wounds. The lights are slow to come on. The panels lining the walls and ceiling glow violently bright before fading to a dim twenty- or thirty-percent power, while a few lights further down the hall flicker irregularly.

It bathes everything with red-tinged glow. “Ominous color for an AI,” he mutters, and over the comms his team agrees.

The thick soles of his boots touch down to the floor as the grav-generator comes online, albeit at a low-power setting that doesn’t quite match the comforting weight the _Gibraltar_ gives.

“Thanks, Torbjorn,” Jack says, a breathy chuckle following. There’s still too much bounce in his steps, but it’s a hell of a lot better than maneuvering through the halls with no gravity at all.

“Don’t thank me just yet,” the engineer growls into the comm. “She’ll run an hour. Maybe two. Then she's done for good.”

“The AI... she’s not being very cooperative,” Reinhardt says, rumbling and uncertain. He’s been uncharacteristically quiet for the entire expedition. “And all this red text is difficult to read.”

There isn’t time to fret about Volskaya’s aesthetics or what’s amiss with the battered _Svyatogor_ ’s AI. “Just focus on getting to the black box and sending Baba Yaga’s logs to Athena. I want to know if any escape pods launched and if she can track them down. Uh, make sure you pull the manifest info, too. And video, if there’s any left—”

“We’ll get everything we can before the last of the reserve power goes out, Captain,” Torbjorn assures him, the gentle whir of a console in operation filling the background as he speaks. 

Jack soldiers on toward the remaining crew deck. There’s a monitor screen embedded at the main entrance, and now that the power is up and running it blinks out a register of the current vitals and status of the quarters within: temperature, three degrees Kelvin; oxygen, zero; warm body count, zero. It lists all of the crew as logged out, their cabins empty. 

He scrolls through names and finds none he recognizes. Gabriel could’ve been assigned quarters closer to Katya Volskaya, on a higher deck. Or he might’ve been berthed in the other crew quarters, which are—

Gone. Completely gone, their occupants violently spaced, their bodies shattered into stardust.

No. _No._ Jack shakes the thought and flicks deeper through the AI’s logs for the crew deck, skimming across more obscure metrics— radiation, carbon levels, vitamin D output. He stops when symbols he doesn’t recognize appear. They’re strange, curvilinear shapes arranged with _purpose_ , though he has no clue what that might be.

Confused, he taps the display screen. The colored plasma ripples faintly, but the numbers and symbols remain the same. “Doc, does this look right to you? Or am I having a stroke?”

“I’d know if you were having a stroke before _you_ would, Captain Morrison,” Dr. Zeigler reminds him. There is a faint yellow light at the corner of his visor as she switches to his camera and sees the same impossible display. An effect of some damage done to the AI, maybe. Or electromagnetic interference.

“This is… absolutely puzzling,” says her voice, softly accented and deeply thoughtful. “I have never seen anything like it. Reinhardt, have you gotten ahold of the black box yet? Winston and Satya are dying to take a look at the ship’s data, and I confess I am just as curious.”

“Torbjorn and I are extracting it now.” Reinhardt sounds grave; Torbjorn continues to maintain radio silence as he does the delicate work.

After passing through the empty crew quarters, shining a light in the dark places between rows of stacked beds and tiny private quarters, Jack advances deeper into the _Svyatogor_ ’s remains. The halls wind and twist. He swings his pulse rifle around every corner on autopilot, following a form trained into them at the SEP base back on Ganymede. Quick movements and a quicker trigger finger had saved him from hundreds of surprise encounters with omnics.

But this doesn’t feel like omnics, and Jack has fought enough of them over the course of this war to feel confident of that judgment. Hell, if anyone ought to know, it’s him. It’s not even bluster to say he had a strong hand in turning the tide of the generations-long war against the omnics. He and Gabe, side by side in high command like they had been in the field, unshakable… until they lost Ana and things between them frayed and split, and now Gabe is—

The crew may be dead in space, but someone had to have survived onboard to send the distress signal, and they’d sent it to the Gibraltar. To Jack. It _has_ to be Gabriel, except he’s missing along with any sign of life, and maybe it’s been too long—

“ _Jack_.” Dr. Zeigler’s voice is insistent, snapping him back to the present darkness and tight metal halls.

“Sorry, Doc,” he says, exhale shaky.

His boots don’t connect with the steel grating quite right. Reserve-power gravity is weak. He feels like he’s liable to drift upward and sideways at a wrong, too-hard step—the moment reserve power fails, he’ll be adrift in the dark bowels of the dead ship, bouncing off the walls as he hunts his way back to his team.

Jack takes a deep breath and ignores a warning beep from the oxygen tank.

“Deck 4-C and still nothing,” he informs Dr. Ziegler— and Winston and Satya, who are no doubt monitoring his vitals alongside those of Reinhardt and Torbjorn.

He has to pry open a door to enter the stairwell. It is a darkened pit, devoid of any operational light panels, and the flashlight mounted atop his rifle and the faint glow of his suit only push back the dark as far as the first landing.

He keeps his pulse rifle raised as he slowly descends, muzzle pointed down into a darkness that seems as bleak as the vacuum outside. Another landing. The wall marks it as Deck 5-C. Medical.

Omnics deal in total destruction, but the _Svyatogor_ is still mostly intact. The signs of an explosion are obvious, but it confined to the hangar bay, armory and starboard crew quarters. It’s a puzzle with pieces that don’t quite fit.

A critical malfunction, Satya said. But if it _was_ a spontaneous failure, the crew should’ve been scattered throughout the ship, most of them surviving within the undamaged failsafes. And Omnics would’ve blown the whole ship apart rather than risk any human surviving. This— _this_ is eerie.

Jack sweeps down the hall at as rapid a clip as the flimsy gravity will allow, scanning through the medical wards and exercise rooms with greater urgency and less apprehension. His visor isn’t picking up bodies at all— warm _or_ cold— and it’s the absence of anyone that deepens his misgivings. Entire wings and floors are _empty_ , and space outside littered with thousands of _Svyatogor_ dead.

“Still no sign of any crew?” Winston asks, giving the unsettled question in the back of Jack’s mind a voice.

It digs deeper and more irritatingly into the seat of his skull. “Nothing. No blood, no signs of struggle or combat, no bodies. No parts of bodies, even. Damndest thing.”

He still can’t think of a scenario that would have the entire crew in the area of the explosion, the bridge abandoned and the rest of the ship sealed but starkly empty.

“No omnics,” he adds, almost as an afterthought.

Which is almost as disconcerting.

“Well, I might have some good news,” Torbjorn says to that. “Not only have we secured the black box, but an emergency shuttle launched prior to the distress signal. However… the log is incomplete. What do you make of that, Satya?”

“We will retrieve our answers from the recovered data.” Satya is assured, as ever. “Please return to the drop point for retrieval.”

“Understood,” Reinhardt rumbles. “I will join the captain in the search for survivors once we have secured the black box.”

“Captain Morrison,” Satya says, addressing him rather than Reinhardt. The hesitance that follows is unusual for her. “The scans are complete. I feel I must reiterate that no life was registered aboard the _Svyatogor_ , aside from you three.”

There’s the faintest static because she’s still on the line.

“My apologies, Captain,” she adds.

Jack doesn't slow. "One more level." No one is going to argue with him. "How are we looking on the extraction?"

"Torbjorn is returning to the _Gibraltar_ with the secured data," Reinhardt says. “Shall I come to you, Captain, or initiate a search of my own on the closest floor?” 

There’s too long a silence where Jack isn’t sure what to say. His steps slow as he listens to faintest hum of static over the comm, probably caused by his location and the many floors of steel that separate him from the _Gibraltar_ ’s bridge.

“Please advise,” Reinhardt reiterates.

“I don’t want you taking any unnecessary risks, Reinhardt,” Jack says as he slumps against a nearby wall and tries to catch his breath, which seems determined to leave him as quickly as possible. “Just… just say at the extraction point. I’ll be back up in… ten. Tops.”

“There’s about twenty-minutes left on that engine, Captain,” Torbjorn reminds him at just the same time that Angela sends an alert that flashes across the visor of Jack’s helmet.

_You are dangerously close to hyperventilating._

He shuts his eyes against the glow of the golden text until it fades behind his eyelids; he counts out slow measures as he inhales and exhales, until his breathing stabilizes again.

There is silence for the next few minutes, thick and uncomfortable, as he continues down the hall. There’s no guarantee they aren’t speaking amongst themselves back on the bridge. Jack can tell they're waiting for him to call it. He can’t fault them for it, either, though he dreads the inevitable moment.

He tears down the next stairwell two steps at a time. 6-C is directly below Medical and filled with crew cryo pods, healing tanks. They're all empty, back-lit in red, the cylindrical glass gleaming and crystalline clear.

Except for one pod that isn't. Slightly opaque, frosted,  the faint shape of a figure lying inside.

“Jack?” Dr. Zeigler asks, forgetting any observance of his rank in her worry. “Jack?! Your heart rate—"

“I found someone!” he practically shouts into the comm as he rushes to the cryo pod, rifle slung back over his shoulder. “Reinhardt, can you get to my position?”

He doesn’t hear any response. Or maybe he does, but it doesn’t register as anything more than background noise, like the steady beeping of his oxygen or his own ragged breaths. Jack slams his hand against the sleek console attached to the pod, frantic as he thumps his palm against the buttons on the red-backed screen a few more times for good measure.

The pod is slow to respond. De-cryo takes minutes, of course, and Jack can only swim in agony and relief as the sealed, frosted glass gradually turns crystal-clear.

And he recognizes the man lying within.

* * *

“Your persistence paid off.” 

Jack smiles back at Dr. Zeigler, the validation working wonders on his mood; he’s still grinning as he sips his lukewarm coffee. It’s his third one in the hour. “Sometimes it pays to be stubborn. Gabe always said it was one of my best _and_ most annoying traits.” 

“It certainly served us well today,” she says, thumping her clipboard against her hip as she hovers around the well-padded bed in Medical where Gabriel still slumbers. “I cannot even begin to fathom the odds of this all.” 

Of finding Gabriel onboard a ghost-ship. Of finding Gabriel at all. Among a crew numbering over two-thousand, that the lone survivor would be _Gabe_.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” Jack says after a moment of contemplation. He shouldn’t be elated at the moment— not when the rest of the _Svyatogor_ ’s crew is dead or missing, when Volskaya and her daughter haven’t yet been recovered, when answers are few and far between— but this is a meaningful victory. It deserves some celebration, even if it’s just within his heart.  

“If anyone could survive that, it would be Gabe,” he continues. He’d known it, on some level, deep and interior. It had driven him to ignore Athena and mount a seemingly fruitless search that had yielded something of value after all. “It seemed so unlikely, but that’s always been when he shines,” he tells Dr. Zeigler. “When the odds are stacked against us.”

“Well,” she says, taking deep breath, “I’m certain you two will have much to discuss once he wakes.” 

Jack nods and settles back deeper into the chair beside Gabriel’s bed. There’s an ache behind his eyes that stretches down damn near everywhere, the acute strain of the last ten or twelve hours leaving its mark. He’d been strung tight the whole time Gabriel was transported out of the _Svyatogor_ ’s cryo room and over to the Gibraltar. Every moment was a danger, Gabe’s welfare still in doubt, and he’d remained wound up all through Angela and Athena’s tests, though the second sweep of the Svyatogor with a team of fifty crew, through the first waves of spaced corpses brought into the loading bay to be identified by Athena’s biometric scanners. 

Even now he can’t rest easy. Not til Gabe wakes up and he knows— _really_ knows— he’s okay. Not til he can apologize and try to set things right between them. 

“Hopefully he will provide us with some answers,” Angela sighs out, blonde strands blown aside. “I am confounded by this, Captain, as is Winston. I know Satya is, too, though she wears her assuredness well. How did Athena miss Gabriel’s presence? It could have been a fatal inaccuracy.”

“I registered no signs of life,” Athena chimes in, soothing voice ringing from somewhere overhead. “Winston is recalibrating my sensors when it comes to cryostasis. It is possible that interference allowed me to overlook the slowed heartbeat and respiration of cryo.”

“Thanks, Athena,” Jack says, waving at the steady stream of blue light that runs along the wall. “Please tell Satya and the others that I want a rundown on what they’ve gotten out of Baba-Yaga at… oh, six-hundred hours.” 

“Of course, Captain,” the ship’s AI responds. “You are requested in the loading bay. A crewman found something unusual on one of the bodies recovered from the _Svyatogor_. Dr. Zhou is examining.”

“Unusual?” Jack asks, still bone-tired. He tries to count backward and see how many hours he’s been up, but everything between the _Svyatogor_ ’s mayday and this moment is a streaky blur. “Sure, sure. I’ll be down in two shakes.”

“Do try to get some sleep, Captain,” Dr. Ziegler reminds him as she crosses her arms, clipboard snug against her chest. With a tight little purse of her lips, her gaze slides down to the enclosed pod one spot over from Gabriel’s bed, where Jesse McCree is still healing in cryo. “Jesse will—”

“Keep him under,” Jack says at once, hoping to stagger things out so he can deal with one problem at a time. The last thing he needs is Jesse waking up to their bleak predicament and going off half-cocked, spurred by the news of his beloved mentor’s near-death and a crippling blow to the Volskaya ship-building empire. Impulsive heroism is what landed him in cryo in the first place, after all.

Dr. Zeigler blinks once, as if startled. “Well, yes. I would advise he remain in stasis a while longer. I know how important Commander Reyes is to him, but it’s hardly worth interrupting the healing process just to say hello.”

“Good,” Jack smiles, feeling the tug of a yawn deep in his chest. “We agree this time.”

Angela makes a thoughtful noise as she considers him. “Indeed. Usually, Captain, you would push for the more… emotional option.”

“Better to not half-ass cryo healing,” he shrugs, finally giving into the jaw-popping yawn. It’s satisfying, though the burn of too long with no sleep remains.

As he siddles past the ship’s doctor to leave, there’s a sudden, fuzzy flicker across the projected panels monitoring both Gabriel and Jesse. Too quick for Jack to notice anything but the blink itself, though his brow furrows tight as he stares at the screen for a few moments longer.

Angela frowns until it passes, the screens once again displaying their vitals with constancy and precision. She sighs. “Everything seems to be malfunctioning lately, doesn’t it?”

* * *

Outside the loading bay two decks below, Mei shows him pictures of a strange black substance found on one of the _Svyatogor_ crew, frozen solid in the man’s mouth. It’s like something from one of the old horror movies Gabriel loves to watch— laughing softly to himself as Jack buries his face into his shoulder to hide from the fake gore— only this is unsettlingly real. Jack has Athena seal and quarantine the loading bay, currently filled with the cloth-draped remains of the dead, and then trails Dr. Zhou back up to her lab.

The substance had since turned liquid within the container she had transferred it to— or semi-liquid, at least. It’s a strange thing, at times smoky or dense, some state of matter that reminds him of ferrofluid, oddly enough. 

“Jesus Christ,” Jack mumbles as he drags a hand down his face, staring hard at the dark, vaporous fluid as it writhes in the sealed cylinder. “Is it… alive? Do you think it was on the _Svyatogor_? Or did it attach to him in space?”

“It’s hard to say, Captain,” Dr. Zhou says, barely looking up from the screen she’s typing commands into. “Athena and I are running tests now, and I am trying to contact some colleagues on other deep space vessels for possible insight.”

For a few long moments, Jack watches as the substance twists and plumes in its little reinforced glass prison. It can't be living. Surely not. But there's something about the way it moves...

“Keep me posted,” he tells Mei as Athena reminds him of his oh-six-hundred meeting on the bridge. “And keep a lid on that stuff,” he adds, pointing a gloved finger at the viscous sludge as he backs out of her lab.

He leaves Dr. Zhou to research further and tries to put the memory of the pictures— the crewman’s vessel-burst eyes frozen wide with fear, mouth open wide, black tendrils adhered to his lips and snaking up one nostril— from his mind. He’d thought he’d seen everything under the sun by now. Everything under a dozen suns, all of them alien. 

But this is new. All of this is new, and it puts his nerves on a razor’s edge.

Jack arrives late to the bridge, apologizing to his crew and Officer Vaswani in particular. She only seems a little miffed once he explains the reason why— Mei’s discovery is another piece of the puzzle for her, quickly keyed into an organized array of the details concerning the _Svyatogor_ incident. 

They brief Jack on everything they’ve learned in the seven or eight hours since recovering Gabriel, but the short of it is that they still know terrifyingly little. Satya and Winston confirm that the data from the black box is in shambles. It will take more time to sift through it and make sense of the chaos.

Time they barely have if they want to locate that lone pod before a slow shutdown or starvation kills whoever is inside first— deep space deaths are a thing of terror. His head weighed heavy by too many questions that lack any semblance of answer, Jack drags himself back to Medical and falls asleep in a narrow and uncomfortable chair beside Gabriel’s bed.

When he dreams, it’s disjointed and dark; unmemorable, except for the feeling of a creeping cold at the edges of his mind, tugging at particles of him the way black holes rip material atom-by-atom—

A series of loud, pointed beeps rouse him out of what feels like groggy death, his chin pressed into his chest and a smudge of drool at the corner of his mouth. It wasn’t enough sleep to be rested, not meaningfully, and now there’s a painful knot in his neck from the awkward angle. If Gabe were awake, he’d mock him for becoming such an old man so soon, achy and cranky from sleeping wrong.

Jack’s eyes open on the bland tiled floor of Medical. It’s white, glaring compared to the steel and painted grates throughout the rest of the ship. His gaze lifts, bleary, and gradually slides to the side.

Gabriel _is_ awake, somber brown eyes steadfastly fixed on him.

“Gabe— G-Gabriel,” he stammers out, already lifting halfway out of his chair with the intent of running down Angela. The slightly slurred words that answer draw him short.

“Jack. You know, every time I’ve almost died before,” Gabriel mumbles as he squints up at Jack, “you were right there with me.”

It’s enough to bring the needleprick of hot tears to the outer corners of Jack’s eyes. It’s true— from Ganymede to Andromeda and beyond, they’d always faced the prospect of death together. He blinks furiously and wonders if he ought to get closer, if Gabriel wouldn’t mind.

“So, you missed me?” is what he asks, voice thick as he stands and comes to awkwardly linger by the edge of Gabriel’s bed.

Gabriel covers his face as he reluctantly laughs. It trails off into a contemplative quiet. “I guess I did. I really did. I was… scared I’d die without ever getting to see you again.” 

Now Jack can’t help but cry. “Shit,” he mutters as he rubs at his eyes with the heels of his palms. “Gabe… I’m so sorry. Fuck. Everything with Ana, everything after her. The whole reason you even took this mission was because I— we were fighting so damn often, and— I should’ve—”

“Not your fault, Jack.” Gabriel lightly pats a spot on the bed beside him, and relief fills Jack so completely it must be seeping into even the marrow of his bones. “Not any more than mine, at least.”

He gives out an ugly sniff as Gabriel reaches up and takes his hand into his own. It’s been a long time since they had this, the distance between them stretching back even before Gabe took the Volskaya assignment and committed to eight months in another arm of the galaxy. His palm is messily damp from wiping away his tears, but Gabriel’s skin is comfortingly dry and rough, if a little cold from the heavily filtered air in Medical.

“God, Gabriel,” he whispers, squeezing the other man’s hand tight. “I thought you were dead. Dead because I let you go, Gabe. I really thought I was alone, and I… it’s the most scared I’ve ever been. I still am,” he admits, fingers trembling as he slips them up into the dark, short waves of Gabriel’s hair, thumb tenderly brushing his temple. 

The harrowingly close call seems to have wiped the slate between them mostly clear. Jack’s grateful. The universe is lonely and dark and crushing without someone to cling to while they drift through it. 

He rubs across Gabriel’s knuckles, trying to impart a little of his warmth. Medical is too cold, and he’s tempted to shrug out of his long coat and drape it over the bed. “What happened, Gabe?”

“Can’t be conscious for five minutes before I’m debriefed?” Gabe says with a little groan as he shifts in the bed.

Jack’s heart drops. “No, of course you can rest, Gabe. I just— time is ticking—” 

“I was teasing you, Jack. Has it really been so long you can’t tell anymore?”

“Maybe so.” His laugh is weak. How long _has_ it been since they turned curt and professional? Fifteen months, he figures. Fifteen months on the outs with his best friend, his trusted commander, his lifetime love.

“We stopped at Parashant, Shuksan, Olkarion. Everything went smoothly on each base, each colony. No omnic interference, no engagements while on course. It seemed like a surprisingly easy gig,” Gabriel says, his voice still roughened from lack of use. “Figured the God Programs just didn’t want to pick a fight with a behemoth like the _Svyatogor_ yet.”

 _Possible,_ Jack thinks. The tide of the war had been turning for a couple of years now, the omnics losing more ground with every battle, their losses outpacing what the omniums could replenish. Attacking the _Svyatogor_ head-on was even riskier than engaging a striking-class vessel like the _Gibraltar_ and though the God Programs could be brutal and calculatedly reckless, they were far from stupid.

“We were en route to Daibazaal when I first saw them, Jackie. Omnics, but not like any we’ve ever seen,” Gabriel says, a worried weight to his voice.

Gabriel being worried makes Jack worry more, his anxiety teeming like that thing in Mei’s lab.

“Hard to describe them. They’re some kind of… camouflaged. Don’t know how they got onboard. Or when.” Gabriel rubs the scruff of his short beard. It needs a trimming. “I went to the mess and it was empty, Jack. The halls, too. Unsettling as fuck. The AI wouldn’t respond, either. The whole floor was dead silent.”

Gabriel goes silent here, too.

“I hustled back to Volskaya’s quarters to secure her room. I think that’s when the first explosion happened,” he says, brows furrowing. “There was— she had a secret panic room for herself and her daughter. A private escape pod. Manual failsafes not connected to the AI. I didn’t know about any of it, and I don’t know what tipped her off, but by the time I got there she was already sealed inside and preparing for launch”

“So it wouldn’t have shown up in the records,” Jack says, his chest loosening with relief. If nothing else, Katya Volskaya and her daughter may be safe— somewhere. “Fuck, the scanners might not have picked them up, depending on what cloaking she has it outfitted with. Winston can refine the protocols, maybe… refine the search range. Damn, she was prepared.”

Gabriel snorts softly. “She was.”

Jack’s jaw works side to side for a moment. His hand tightens on its own. “Did she… did she communicate with you at all before…?”

Gabriel nods, his eyes slipping shut. “There was an analog comm. Old-school, not under the AI’s jurisdiction. I told her to go, to get clear of the ship. Told her that I’d try to send out a mayday.”

Jack tries to imagine the shape of that terror. Even if in the line of duty, being abandoned on a doomed ship occupied by omnics would be a crushing, fatalic sort of loneliness. He doesn’t fault Volskaya for it— not with her ship going to pieces and her young daughter’s life at risk— but damn if it isn’t sickening to imagine Gabe going through it.

He runs a hand down Gabriel’s arm and tries not to think of how close he came to losing him. Of what he could’ve found floating in the darkened bowels of the _Svyatogor_ , had things gone differently.

“My memories get hazy, there,” Gabriel tells him, smoothing out the blankets over his middle. “Things were going haywire even before the second explosion, and that one was bigger. Life support started to shut down, escape pods couldn’t launch… cryo was the only thing I could think of. Isolated power sources, and all. Waiting for you to show up like Prince Charming.”

Jack tries not to flush hot at the sight of Gabriel’s little smile, there and gone in a flash. He rubs a hand across his face, feeling prickly stubble, scars, the slickness of old sweat and an unwashed face. He hasn’t showered since the morning before the mayday. “That’s a pretty generous descriptor for me right now.”

Gabriel huffs. “Don’t give me that. I’ve seen you look worse, Morrison.”

Jack has to laugh. Gabe _has_ seen him at his worst, his lowest: filthy and wretched as they trained together on the Ganymede SEP base, wracked with nausea and fever from the genetic therapy to turn them into supersoldiers capable of driving back the omnic threat. He’d seen Jack pale and nearly bled-out on the _Gallipoli_ , had sopped the blood from his face when he was grazed with shrapnel back in Kral territory.

Gabriel has a pair of scars that sit high on his cheek, deep and discolored. Jack was there for those, too. He’d tended Gabriel as often and as well as the older man had looked after him.

“God, Gabe… I was worried about you.”

“Good. Usually it’s the other way around,” Gabriel answers, stretching out on the bed until his toes poke out from under the covers. Jack reaches down to straighten the blankets until Gabe is neatly covered again. “You gave me these worry lines, you know.”

“Well, you gave me an ulcer, so…”

Gabriel shrugs as best he can while lying in the bed, dangerously close to smirking.

Angela shows up then with a tray of re-hydrated food for Gabriel and shoos Jack off to get some actual rest. “It’s the best thing for both of you,” she tells the two older men as they grouse.

Jack gives Gabriel’s fingers one last, gentle squeeze, reluctant to let go. Angela is right. His body agrees, yearning for the comfort of his bed and the quiet dark of the captain’s quarters. Instead, his tired feet trudge back toward the bridge.

He recounts Gabriel’s experience to everyone on deck and is met with troubled stares and muttered curses— aside from Satya, who accepts the grim news with a leveled look. The threat of a new breed of omnic is nightmare fuel, especially if they can take apart an armored flagship like the _Svyatogor._ Their only silver-lining is the possibility of Volskaya’s survival, spirited away in that hidden escape pod. 

His eyelids flutter, heavy with sleep, and he lists on his feet even while speaking. The running thought at the back of his mind is that it’s a miracle Gabe survived. It’s enough to make Jack quietly issue thanks to the vague notion of god his less-than-devout mothers raised him with.

“This is deeply concerning,” Reinhardt sighs, large hands braced on one of the consoles as he hangs his head.

“Understatement of the fucking century,” Torbjorn mutters as he reaches for a flask that Jack has _most certainly_ told him not to drink from on the bridge. Given the circumstances… the captain sees fit to let it slide.

Satya Vaswani, for her part, is pacing the floor with a thoughtful expression, still processing everything. Her elegant fingers flex idly while she turns the information over in her mind. “Thank you, Captain, for giving us Commander Reyes’ account. Is he still awake for questioning?”

“He’s resting,” Jack says, the words weighted with careful warning.

Satya’s fingers curl into a loose fist, but that’s the extent of her displayed frustration.

“So Katya Volskaya could still be alive,” Winston says as he straightens his glasses and moves toward a screen where he can adjust Athena’s metrics. “But if her pod was truly off of Baba Yaga’s books… then that doesn’t account for the one pod we have record of launching.”

“Someone else got away,” Jack says, nodding. “Before the AI went unresponsive and the pods went nonfunctional.”

One other individual out of nearly three-thousand souls. It could be another miracle, but… 

“I find it highly suspect,” Satya says, impatience in her tone. She uncrosses her arms and takes up a place by the bridge’s central console. “In piecing together the data from the black box, I have discovered anomalies within the _Svyatogor_ ’s records. It would appear to be evidence of tampering.” 

“Tampering,” Jack repeats dumbly. When had the omnics ever been known to do anything so delicate as tamper with data records? “How?”

“If I knew such answers, I would have given them straight away.” The mystery of it is getting under her skin; Jack can tell by the tightness around Satya’s mouth, the forceful taps she makes on the console surface. “Look. Logs deleted, footage erased, data corrupted. This was an act of _deliberate_ internal sabotage,” she says, something fierce burning behind her eyes.

“Omnics learning new ways to blow us up,” Jack scoffs.The thought sticks uncomfortably in his mind. Why manipulate and corrupt the data when they could’ve just blown the _Svyatogor_ apart completely? Or destroyed the bridge and the data backups stored a few decks below? “Fantastic.”

“Not just omnics,” Satya says, and Jack’s blood slows to a frigid standstill. “I managed to sift through the corrupted data and reconstruct a handful of image files that aren’t entirely unreadable.”

With a gesture, she draws up a series of projected images. Most are empty halls and rooms, fragmented where corruption has eaten away at the integrity of the files; amid them is a single snapshot of a murky figure standing in a hallway lined with escape pods, an arm outstretched to the control panel beside one of the airlocks. Athena enhances it a few times, and though the image remains blurry, it’s enough to paint a picture. 

“There’s our launched pod,” Reinhardt states, thick brows lifting. “Do we know who she is? A crewmember saving herself?”

Satya shakes her head. “It is entirely possible she is _Svyatogor_ crew, but no facial match can be made with such a low resolution picture. Whoever this is, I believe she may have been a conspirator of some kind.”

“A conspirator? With the omnics?” Torbjorn sounds nearly surprised enough to laugh. “A human working with omnics… ah, that’s impossible.”

“Perhaps.” Satya’s shrug is elegant, perfectly fluid. But there is a tenseness just beneath that belies the controlled ease of her movements. “Perhaps this signifies a shift in their strategy, allowing the infiltration of even highly armored ships like the _Svyatogor_ through espionage and betrayal. Someone with clearance for the ship could have secreted omnics aboard during one of the _Svyatogor_ ’s scheduled stops.”

Satya tilts her head. “Or perhaps she is not human at all, and was merely planted onboard to allow the other omnics access later.”

She says it so simply, though it floors everyone else on deck. It’s why Jack values her on his ship— hard analysis, quick observations, open to the unconventional if it’s where the facts lead. It would’ve taken him a lot longer to make _that_ jump alone.

“So we either have a traitor to our species,” Jack weighs, “or new omnics that can pass for human.”

He shudders at the thought. As if your garden-variety weren’t monstrous enough. Human spy or mimicking robot, this is a long-game he’d once thought to be beyond the omnics’ God Programs to devise. He blinks slow, weary. They’re _learning_. Adapting to an opponent they can no longer crush with sheer numbers and sledgehammer force. 

“Perhaps they’re making upgrades across the board. Trying them out to see what works best,” Winston suggests glumly. “If the _Svyatogor_ was a calculated experiment… I can’t imagine they’re too disappointed in the results.” 

“Aside from Volskaya getting away,” Jack mutters, pinching at his lower lip as he studies the blurry picture Satya had recovered. She’s an obvious enemy to strike at, a target on par with high military commanders like himself and Gabriel. The God Programs must be fuming at Volskaya’s slipping away, if they’re already privy to that intel.

Satya slides prosthetic fingers across a holoscreen and enlarges the working image of the woman in the escape pod. It’s low-resolution, too dark and incomplete to really be useful; something captured by cameras already flagging from fading fuel cells and pieced together by the dying ship’s AI. 

“I have ascribed her the codename Sombra for the purposes of investigation,” Satya announces.

A hazy, shadowy figure slipping away all by her lonesome. A mystery within the greater mystery they’re stuck puzzling over. The longer Jack stares at the warped image, the greater his unease. 

“Keep me posted,” he says, at last feeling the pull of his bedroom— of seclusion and comforting darkness, a chance to shrug out of his long coat and uniform, captain’s bars and stripes forgotten on the floor for a few hours.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on Tumblr [@neyasochi](https://neyasochi.tumblr.com) and twitter [@neyasochi](https://twitter.com/neyasochi)!


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